OTTAWA — Stephen Harper is wed to his timetable for a fall election next year, despite being urged to drop the writ early.

Some Conservatives have suggested going early because of the Mike Duffy trial, which is set to start dripping bad news (from Mr. Harper’s point of view) from next April. The Prime Minister is said to be undaunted.

But there may be an equally compelling reason to go early – to disrupt the massive anti-Conservative advertising blitz planned by Canada’s largest private sector union.

There’s a new breed of highly politicized union in town – and they’re intent on doing to Mr. Harper what they recently did to Tim Hudak in Ontario.

Unifor was created last year from the merger of the Canadian Auto Workers and the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers unions, to lead the fight-back against the Harper government, according to Jerry Dias, the national president.

“The creation of Unifor was a response to the federal government and the unprecedented attack being faced by working class people,” he said.

Federal politics has not yet experienced the power of a union formed with the express purpose of defeating one political party.

But in Ontario, the Progressive Conservative party attributes its successive defeats, at least in part, to the negative advertising paid for by the unions.

In the Senate Thursday, Senator Bob Runciman said unions spent $10-million in the recent Ontario election – all on a campaign to “Stop Hudak.”

Mr. Runciman was speaking during debate on a private members’ bill that would force unions to publicly disclose details of their political spending. The bill — C377 — was gutted by senators last year but is now back in the upper chamber and is a major irritant for unions.

The Ontario campaign may be a harbinger of what Conservative parties across the country can expect to face in the future.

In the Ontario election, the Workers’ Rights Campaign operated more like a shadow political party than a union, with its own war-room, field organizers and campaign strategy. In previous campaigns, certain unions backed the Liberals; others supported the NDP. In 2014, there were strenuous efforts made to avoid splitting the anti-Conservative vote.

‘There’s no question that pre-writ we can do all kinds of things. But to suggest we will spend $40-million is quite ridiculous’

Sid Ryan, president of the Ontario Labour Federation, said the labour movement came together in a way he had not seen in 20 years.

The key difference between Ontario and federal elections is that third parties cannot advertise federally once the writ is dropped. But, thanks to fixed election date legislation, the unions know exactly when the next election is going to be — and can do pretty much what they please until the writ officially drops a month before voting day.

Mr. Dias dismissed speculation that Mr. Harper might call a snap election. “Nah, nah. He will drop a feel-good budget and then spend months on a travelling roadshow paid for by the taxpayer.”

Conservative MPs have suggested Unifor may have up to $40-million to spend trying to bring down Mr. Harper. (When Unifor was created last year, it said it had $50-million to spend on organizing over five years — $10-million a year to “organize” new members and attract citizens to social causes.)

“That’s utterly ridiculous,” Mr. Dias said of the idea of a $40-million, anti-Tory war chest. “There’s no question that pre-writ we can do all kinds of things. But to suggest we will spend $40-million is quite ridiculous. We certainly have resources and we are a very politically engaged organization in the defence of working people’s interests. But those decisions will be made by the national executive board,” he said.

Mr. Dias said the Ontario campaign provided a confidence boost for a labour movement that has been in decline for 30 years – only 16% of workers in the private sector are union members.

“Ontario showed we can mobilize and win,” he said. “We will certainly be involved where we can make a difference.”

Mr. Dias said that organized labour took a battering during the recession. “But here we are in 2014 and things have turned around significantly.”

Voices inside the Conservative caucus have urged Mr. Harper to call an early election to disrupt Unifor’s pre-writ advertising buys.

Sources say the Prime Minister is concerned that breaking his own fixed election date legislation in a majority-government context would appear opportunistic — particularly in advance of Mr. Duffy’s trial.

But in sticking with that timing, he is gifting his union opponents the chance to influence a federal election in a way we have not seen in a very long time.

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Re: Canada’s Shrinking Union Footprint, editorial, July 15.
This editorial perpetuates the myth that unions are responsible for improving the lot of the middle class and driving up wages. Those who study economics and follow the teachings of renowned economist Milton Friedman know that unions were not primarily responsible for increased wages and better working conditions. Rather, capitalism and the increased demand for workers caused by economic growth led to higher wages and better conditions.

Unions typically drive up wages for a select few by restricting job opportunities. Governments also restrict opportunity through misguided minimum wage laws. Unskilled and uneducated citizens find the doors to employment closed on them because the minimum wage is set at a rate higher than their skills would dictate, and thus they don’t get hired. Employers who would take a chance on an unskilled worker if the price was right, end up not hiring that worker because of the minimum wage. The success story of starting in the mail room and becoming the CEO will never happen because higher minimum wages have eliminated those jobs.

Allow businesses to flourish by unleashing capitalism and, as demonstrated time and time again, the lot of all workers will be improved. Unfortunately, the truth is lost in the usual drivel about income inequality.Jonathan Smith, Richmond Hill, Ont.

‘A Zionist at heart’

Re: Of Tennis And Bomb Shelters, Mireille Silcoff, July 10.
I was moved to tears by Mireille Silcoff’s article. It reflected the balance of anguish, faith and courage that is the hallmark of the Jewish consciousness in the face of impossible, unnecessary danger.

I am a Greek Sikh. I love the Jewish people, I really am a Zionist at heart. My father was part of the underground in Greece during the Second World War. He helped get Jewish people out of Europe through Piraeus. He risked his life daily, but his efforts were well worth it.

When my daughter was an archaeologist, was regularly took part in digs in Israel. Before each one (during the particularly dangerous years) we had to decide if it was safe enough to go. We always decided that, while it wasn’t really safe, life, faith and courage were more important. She always went. It was worth it.

I feel great sadness and compassion for the Palestinian people who have leaders that would rather use them as human shields and lie to them with such hate, rather than helping them build a better future. I pray for them all.Guru Raj Kaur Khalsa, Vancouver.

‘Free Gaza’

Re: Ground Offensive, July 18.
I recently saw a guy with a large sign that read, “Free Gaza.” I stopped and looked at him, and realized that the solution lies in those two words. There are hundreds of millions of Arabs in the Middle East and there are only 1.6 million who enjoy human rights, including personal and religious freedom. Those 1.6 million Arabs all live in Israel.

It is clear that the Arab Spring only brought more extremism, violence and repression to the region, so maybe it is time to “Free Gaza”: To give them the freedom not to be used as human shields, to make them free of the violence that saw Hamas members throw Fatah members off the roofs of tall buildings and crash weddings with blazing machine guns because of the presence of music. Free Gaza because Israel called a ceasefire to resupply Gazans with the necessities of life. Free Gaza because the Arabs originally came to what was then called Palestine and is now Israel to join the indigenous Jews in an equal and productive society, where they could be free and get an education, jobs and medical care. Free Gaza of Hamas and the vile leadership that puts the bombs in the concrete bunkers and the people on rooftops. If there must be war, at least Free Gaza.Paul Rotenberg, Toronto.

Conservative judiciary

Re: In Defence Of Bob Runciman And Parliamentary Supremacy, letters to the editor, July 18.
Your letter writers treat the notion of judicial supremacy as anathema to conservatism. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was constitutional theorist Albert Venn Dicey who rationalized the importance of Parliament, but his reasons were predicated on MPs doing the “gentlemanly” thing and opposing unfair laws.

The centralization of power in the PMO, starting with Mackenzie King C.D. Howe, combined with parties increasingly whipping their members to support or oppose legislation, undermines Parliament as a champion of fairness. John Diefenbaker recognized Parliament’s inability to protect individual rights and gave us the predecessor to the Charter — The Bill of Rights.

As a criminal lawyer, Mr. Diefenbaker also understood that Canadians needed protection from the welfare state ideology that had taken hold in Canada. Indeed, the idea that citizens need protection from the state was first articulated by another conservative by the name of Edmund Burke. The Charter has served Canadians well by allowing the courts to slap the power-grubbing hands of government.Sam Goldstein, Toronto.

Airplane!

Re: Two Similar Incidents Of Civilian Jets Shot Down, July 18.
Your article missed one important incident. According to Wikipedia: “Siberia Airlines Flight 1812 crashed over the Black Sea on 4 October 2001, en route from Tel Aviv, Israel to Novosibirsk, Russia. The plane, a Soviet-made Tupolev Tu-154, carried an estimated 66 passengers and 12 crew members. No one on board survived. The crash site is some 190 km west-southwest of the Black Sea resort of Sochi and 140 km north of the Turkish coastal town of Fatsa and 350 km east-southeast of Feodosiya, Ukraine.

Ukrainian military officials initially denied that their missile had brought down the plane. However, Ukrainian officials later admitted that it was indeed their military that shot down the airliner.”Jakub Ciring, Calgary.

‘Upholding international law’

Re: Hundreds Dead As Jet ‘Blown Out Of The Sky,’ July 18.
Igor Girkin, a.k.a Igor Strelkov, head of the criminal gang still terrorizing the Ukrainian citizens of Donetsk, took credit for shooting down Malaysian Air flight MH17. A medium-range surface to air missile was used. One of the victims was a Canadian.

Having admitted to perpetrating mass murder, Mr. Girkin should be tried as a war criminal. As he is also a Russian citizen, and a colonel in the Russian military, will Russian President Vladimir Putin now order Mr. Girkin’s arrest to demonstrate the Russian Federation’s commitment to upholding international law?Lubomyr Luciuk, professor, Department of Political Science, Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Ont.

Now that the Ontario election is over, Queen’s Park needs to act decisively to find as many means as possible to stem the flow of red ink from Ontario’s books.

And while there will no doubt be heated discussion about where to find these savings — whether through cuts or attrition — there is one major policy change that is hiding in plain sight that could save anywhere from $190-million to $283-million per year.

This policy change wouldn’t require new investment. In fact, it requires the government to do almost nothing except bring its procurement practices in line with those of almost every other province and developed country.

Actually, it’s even simpler than that: Ontario’s government and its major cities can save money just by bringing construction procurement in line with what its own laws, guidelines and practices already require.

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Despite such requirements, cities such as Toronto, Hamilton, Sault Ste. Marie — and now the Region of Waterloo — take construction-project bids only from a limited pool of contractors who are affiliated with a particular union. In other words, workers and contractors can be shut out of bidding on hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of work because they exercised their basic freedom to associate with someone other than the particular union that holds the monopoly.

In 2012, the Hamiton-based Cardus think tank discovered that over $900-million dollars per year was tied up by such monopolies. The unions that benefit from the monopoly suggest that the cost increase is a modest 2%, while other estimates suggest it is an order of magnitude higher.

Cardus’s forthcoming paper, Evaluating Closed Tendering in Construction Markets: the Need for Fairness and Fiscal Responsibility, covers a wide range of empirical studies on competition in government construction procurement. These suggest that Ontarians are paying 20% to 30% more for construction projects that are subject to closed tendering. That means that every time a water treatment plant is built in Hamilton, Toronto, Sault Ste. Marie, every time carpentry work gets done in the Region of Waterloo, taxpayers are paying 20% to 30% too much.

There is absolutely no justifiable reason for this. As we note in our paper, it is universally acknowledged that public procurement is intended to serve “the good of the general public, as contrasted with the particular individuals or firms involved in a decision.”

In fact, the importance of competition is so universally accepted as the best way to attain value for the public that Ontario’s law, and all of its procurement guidelines, supposedly require it. Take the Ontario Municipal Act: “Municipalities shall not confer on any person the exclusive right of carrying on any business, trade or occupation.” Or, take Ontario’s Broader Public Sector Procurement Directive, which also mandates open, competitive bidding.

The reason that directives and laws like these are in place in all OECD countries is that there is a consensus that competition creates the best value for the government, and minimizes the possibility of corruption. As we note in our paper, the structural framework for bidding on major municipal projects in Ontario is analogous to those that, in Quebec, led to the culture of corruption traced in the Charbonneau Commission’s interim report.

Premier Kathleen Wynne has set an ambitious goal for her government: to balance Ontario’s budget without making cuts. Allowing Ontario municipalities, school boards, and other public entities to fall in line with what is already mandated by the province will help her accomplish that.

National Post

Brian Dijkema is program director, work and economics at Cardus, a Hamilton-based think tank.

Another election campaign has come and gone in Ontario, and one certainty remains: the province’s unions will not hesitate to use the billions of dollars in forced contributions they collect from workers to influence the political process.

Ontarians are familiar with the so-called Working Families Coalition, a union-funded entity that reportedly spent up to $10-million on advertising during the 2011 election campaign (and who knows how much this time). But that is just the tip of the iceberg. All kinds of labour organizations publicly denounced Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives, including the usual suspects like teachers, public servants, UNIFOR and the Ontario Federation of Labour.

More troubling were interventions from organizations the public expects to be above politics, like the Ontario Provincial Police Association and the Southern Ontario News Media Guild. And some were just bizarre, like the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, over which the Province of Ontario has no jurisdiction whatsoever, but which nonetheless felt the need to advise its members not to vote Conservative.

Just watching the ads or reading the headlines, you could easily assume unionized Ontarians were unanimously opposed to the Conservatives. Yet did you see a single poll of those workers asking their voting preferences? Did unions ask their rank and file if they wanted their leadership to endorse or denounce a particular party? Of course not. Union bosses have free reign.

Canada is truly unique in this regard. In the United States, unionized workers can opt out of the portion of their dues that would be used for activities not related to collective bargaining, such as political campaigns. Likewise, France, Ireland, Italy and Germany all have legislation prohibiting the use of compulsory dues for contributions to political parties or candidates. In the United Kingdom, employees cannot even be compelled to join a union as a condition of employment — unlike in Canada, where workers have to pay dues or find another job.

Unions and other Canadian labour organizations do not even have to disclose to their members or the general public anything about their financial activities, creating a two-headed electoral monster: a multi-billion dollar slush fund for union bosses to engage in politics, and no transparency or accountability over how they spend the money.

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Canadians should be concerned about this murky world of election financing, since union bosses are so clearly trying to influence outcomes. A press release from UNIFOR on election night boasted that it, along with “other unions and progressive groups, is proud to have been part of the movement that successfully prevented Hudak from forming a majority government.” “The Stop Hudak campaign forces Hudak to resign,” the Ontario Federation of Labour’s Sid Ryan Tweeted. “He took on Labour and lost. We are coming after Harper next.”

Unions should be free to engage in the political process however they wish, but they should not be allowed to do so with forced contributions from workers, and with no transparency. There are two simple solutions to this problem.

If unions want to play politics, then the public has a right to know how much of their time and money is being used for that purpose

First, unionized Canadians should enjoy the same freedom as their counterparts in other countries to opt out of the portion of their dues used for purposes other than collective bargaining. Unions could still raise funds for their political campaigns, but on a voluntary basis like any other organization. Indeed, if union bosses are truly representing the interests of their workers, they should have no trouble raising money.

Second, it is time to shine a light on union finances, as mandated in a bill currently sitting before the Senate. This too is something required in the rest of the developed world, and long overdue in Canada. If unions want to play politics, then the public has a right to know how much of their time and money is being used for that purpose.

For a country that has gone to such great lengths to mandate transparency in the electoral process, it is remarkable that unions can still spend millions influencing the political process with little to no public scrutiny. That has to change.

National Post

Terrance Oakey is the president of Merit Canada, a united national voice for open shop construction associations across Canada.

In the fall of 2012, Ontario held two provincial byelections that were unusually important. If the governing Liberals took both, then-premier Dalton McGuinty would have upped his seat count just enough to have turned a minority legislature into an effective majority.

Kagan McLeod/National Post

The upstart NDP blocked his path to comfortable rule, taking a riding it had never held before in affluent Kitchener-Waterloo. Union support was considered a big factor in the win, as labour organizations had mobilized against the Liberals when Mr. McGuinty brought in austerity measures the previous spring. Indeed, at the NDP victory party in a Waterloo banquet hall that night, leaders of four of the province’s largest labour unions stood, in orange shirts, smiling as Ontario’s newest MPP was introduced. One of them bragged that the NDP had been handed a “Cadillac of campaigns” thanks to union largesse.

It was only months later, after financial statements were filed, that the extent of the largesse was known. Unions representing elementary teachers had spent more than $846,000 on advertising campaigns. The secondary-school teachers had spent another $676,000 on ads.

The New Democratic Party itself had spent $50,000.

The campaign is a microcosm of what is happening in Ontario’s general election, now entering its final week. Unions have adjusted their sights to Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak, who is proposing his own austerity measures, and everyone from teachers to service workers to nurses to police — yes, police — has joined in the advertising strafing runs.

Ontario has laws — or a lack of them — that make its situation unique, but it is not alone in feeling the effects of a strong union influence on public policy. In British Columbia, a contract dispute between the Liberals and the teachers’ union has brought strike action, a heavy advertising campaign, and no end of court battles. In Quebec, the Charbonneau commission has uncovered union funds being spent in all sorts of non-bargaining ways, including the construction of a strip club. In Alberta, public-sector workers including doctors, teachers and nurses have all sparred with the governing PCs in recent years.

And in every case, the ability of public-sector unions to mount pet campaigns is driven by money — and a lot of it.

Canada is unique among major Western economies in allowing both the collection of mandatory union dues and the use of that money to fund political activities. In the United States, workers have the right to opt out of the portion of their union dues that would be used for non-bargaining activities. In the United Kingdom, workers cannot be compelled to join a union as a condition of employment; they can opt in or out.

(Several U.S. states have adopted similar laws.) France, Germany and Italy prohibit the use of compulsory union dues for political contributions. And in Australia, workers can neither be forced to join a union if one exists at their place of work nor have to pay the portion of union dues that would go toward political activities.

Meanwhile, those countries all have systems in place that require unions to disclose basic financial information about major expenses.

In Canada, union financials are utterly opaque. According to the Ministry of Finance, about $860-million worth of union dues were deducted from tax returns in 2012, the last year for which numbers are available, up from $705-million in 2007. There are estimates that the total amount of dues collected runs into the billions. That money, which is exempt from federal taxes, can be spent however the union chooses: office space, staff salaries, organized protests, political attack ads. And the employee has no say over any of it.

Russ Hiebert, the B.C. MP who introduced a private member’s bill that would require unions to disclose basic financial statements, plus expenses of $5,000 or more, says “these are institutions that receive a public benefit in terms of tax deductibility, and in terms of tax-exempt revenues, and there is no accountability in terms of how those dollars are spent.”

His bill, C-377, passed the House of Commons last year — a rarity for a private member’s bill — but was hung up in the Senate. It had the unfortunate timing of landing in the upper chamber at about the time the Senate was in the throes of an expense scandal, and was collateral damage in the feud between both houses of parliament and the Prime Minister’s Office.

Mr. Hiebert dismisses concerns that disclosure would be a burden on the unions, noting that Canada requires the same thing of registered charities, which also receive preferential tax status. He notes that a Canadian union that is affiliated with a U.S. parent will have to provide its financials to the U.S. Department of Labor, but can keep such details shrouded from the Canadian government, and taxpayer.

Asked if part of the motivation for C-377, which is back before the Senate this year, is to expose the amount of union money spent on political activities, Mr. Hiebert gives a measured response. That’s one benefit, he allows: “We don’t know where the money goes.” But, he says, “I just believe that for institutions that receive public support, the public has a right to know at least some of what that money is used for.”

Mr. Hiebert says he believes Canadian unions collect as much as $4-billion a year in annual dues.

Though unions won’t disclose their financial statements publicly, occasionally they leak out. A 2011 report prepared for the CUPE national convention offers a snapshot into the money behind one of the country’s major unions. That year, it counted almost $160-million that went into its general fund, revenues that covered staff and office expenses, as well as a $2.5-million “anti-privatization” campaign. CUPE also had a strike fund worth more than $40-million and a defence fund, “for most of our political activity,” that had a budget of about $9-million annually.

It, and unions like it, can spend that money on political causes aggressively outside of a writ period — or, in Ontario, inside of one.

There is little doubt that public-sector unions are effective at their main purpose: increasing compensation for their members. A 2010 Cato Institute study found that public-sector unions “push up the cost of the public workforce by 8%, on average.”

Aaron Vincent Elkaim/The Canadian PressThousands of protesters rally for public education at an event organized by the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario in August 2012. The ability of public-sector unions to mount pet campaigns is driven by money — and a lot of it.

Sarah Anzia, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, co-wrote a paper on the costs to government of public sector unions in 2012. She and a colleague from Stanford examined three different eras, and found that in each, public-sector unions increased costs relative to governments that didn’t have unionized employees by between four and nine per cent. The increase is driven by two things, Prof. Anzia said in an interview. First, the collective bargaining process itself, “and also, [the unions] tend to be very active in politics,” exerting pressure where they can.

Those figures are mirrored in a recent report from the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity, a think-tank funded by the Ontario government. Looking at data for Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta from 1997 to 2012, it found there was a “public wage premium” of about 7%, and the trend has been upward in each province. Meanwhile, the premium was larger for such low-ranking jobs as “clerical” positions (9.7%) and negative for senior managers, who are paid at a 13.8% discount relative to private-sector managers. (Unions routinely blast management as being overpaid.)

The difference in public and private wages is due to a host of factors, not the least of which is the inherently awkward relationship between a government and its unions. Where a private company can up and move if it decides it can’t reach an agreement with unionized workers, a government has no such out.

“When you look at what is driving a government when it negotiates with its workers, it’s not clear what the motivation is. Is it to keep voters happy? Is it to get re-elected?”

In addition, she notes, public-sector unions that are heavily involved in politics are effectively helping select their senior managers. “It’s an unusual relationship,” she says, “and very different from the private sector.”

The ability of public-sector unions to mount pet campaigns is driven by money — and a lot of it

In Ontario, unions and union-backed organizations spent more than $6-million in the 2011 election, which returned Mr. McGuinty to power. The Hudak PCs challenged the legality of the ad binge after the fact, but an Ontario court ruled that the various anti-PC campaigns were not partisan in nature because they didn’t support a particular party. Attacking one, the court determined, did not count as partisan.

“It’s absurd,” says Catherine Swift of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, a lobby group that has been outspoken about the union influence on Ontario politics. “You only have to read those ads to know that they are partisan in nature.”

“The rules have to change,” she says, a view that is shared by, among others, the Chief Electoral Officer of Ontario.

“It perverts our elections in a big way,” Ms. Swift says.

It also puts pressure on the public purse. The report from the Prosperity Institute notes that the largest disparity between public and private wages occurred during the 2009 recession. “While private-sector wages decreased, public-sector wages proved to be recession proof,” the report says. In Ontario, it wasn’t until the McGuinty re-election in 2011 that anyone in government suggested wages needed to be reined in.

Third parties have six months to file expense reports with Elections Ontario, meaning the public will know by December — long after the current campaign is over — how much the unions spent during it.

Ms. Swift has a rough estimate: “They’re blowing their brains out this year for sure.”

Milwaukee — In 2011, tens of thousands of government employees and others, enraged by Governor Scott Walker’s determination to break the ruinously expensive and paralyzing grip that government workers’ unions had on Wisconsin, took over the capitol building in Madison. With chanting, screaming and singing supplemented by bullhorns, bagpipes and drum circles, their cacophony shook the building that the squalor of their occupation made malodorous. They spat on Republican legislators and urinated on Walker’s office door. They shouted, “This is what democracy looks like!”

When they and Democratic legislators failed to prevent passage of Act 10, they tried to defeat — with a scurrilous smear campaign that backfired — an elected state Supreme Court justice. They hoped that changing the court’s composition would get Walker’s reforms overturned. When this failed, they tried to capture the state Senate by recalling six Republican senators. When this failed, they tried to recall Walker. On the night that failed — he won with a larger margin than he had received when elected 19 months earlier — he resisted the temptation to proclaim, “This is what democracy looks like!”

Walker recounts these events in Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge. Most books by incumbent politicians are not worth the paper they never should have been written on. If, however, enough voters read Walker’s nonfiction thriller, it will make him a — perhaps the — leading candidate for his party’s 2016 presidential nomination.

Act 10 required government workers to contribute 5.8% of their salaries to their pensions (hitherto, most paid nothing) and to pay 12.8% of their health care premiums (up from 6% but still just half of what the average federal worker pays). Both percentages are well below the private-sector average. By limiting collective bargaining to base wages, Act 10 freed school districts to hire and fire teachers based on merit, and to save many millions of dollars by buying teachers’ health insurance in the competitive market rather than from an entity run by the teachers’ union. Restricting collective bargaining to wages ended the sort of absurd rules for overtime compensation that made a bus driver Madison’s highest paid public employee.

Act 10’s dynamite, however, was the provision ending the state’s compulsory collection of union dues — sometimes as high as $1,400 per year — that fund union contributions to Democrats. Barack Obama and his national labour allies made Wisconsin a battleground because they knew that when Indiana made paying union dues optional, 90% of state employees quit paying, and similar measures produced similar results in Washington, Colorado and Utah.

Walker has long experience in the furnace of resistance to the looting of public funds by the public’s employees. He was elected chief executive of heavily Democratic Milwaukee County after his predecessor collaborated with other officials in rewriting pension rules in a way that, if he had been re-elected instead of resigning, would have given him a lump-sum payment of $2.3-million and $136,000 a year for life.

Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesUnion members protest inside the Wisconsin State Capitol on March 4, 2011 in Madison, Wisconsin.

To fight the recall — during which opponents disrupted Walker’s appearance at a Special Olympics event, and squeezed Super Glue into the locks of a school he was to visit — Walker raised more than $30-million, assembling a nationwide network of conservative donors that could come in handy if he is re-elected next year. Having become the first U.S. governor to survive a recall election, he is today serene as America’s first governor to be, in effect, elected twice to a first term. When he seeks a second term, his probable opponent will be a wealthy opponent who says her only promise is to not make promises. This is her attempt to cope with an awkward fact: She will either infuriate her party’s liberal base or alarm a majority of voters by promising either to preserve or repeal Act 10.

Walker is politely scathing — a neat trick — of Mitt Romney’s campaign, especially of Romney’s statement that, “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” because “we have a very ample safety net.” The imperative, Walker says, is to “help them escape the safety net.”

“Outside the Washington beltway,” he says pointedly, “big-government liberals are on the ropes.” No incumbent Republican governor has lost a general election since 2007. Since 2008, the number of Republican governors has increased from 21 to 30, just four short of the party’s all-time high reached in the 1920s. He thinks Republican governors are in tune with the nation. If re-elected, he probably will test that theory.

In 2012, NDP Pat Martin did something he no doubt wishes he could take back. It was during the height of the robocalls scandal, in which automatically dialled telephone calls played a recorded message that lied to voters in an Ontario riding about where their polling station was. The calls were pretty clearly a dirty trick played against the Liberals, who ended up winning, anyway. The calls originated from Racknine, an Edmonton-based company that has done work for the Tories in the past. Martin, full of outrage and indignation, went on the CBC and directly accused the company, and its owner, Matt Meier, of direct, willful involvement in the affair.

This was a serious mistake. First, because Meier, and his company, were only contracted to make the calls, and were not responsible for the content. Second, because Meier offered full co-operation with the investigation. And third, because Martin made these comments outside of the House of Commons, where he’d have been protected by privilege. Martin eventually issued a total surrender and complete apology, but it was too late. Meier sued, and knowing his goose was thoroughly cooked, Martin settled. The terms are unknown, but it’s believed the settlement cost Martin a very pretty penny, plus legal bills aplenty.

And that’s where things get interesting.

To pay this settlement, Martin took a loan from his party, the federal NDP. To repay this loan, he legal defence fund accepted a series of gifts from no less than 17 labour unions and local associations, including some of the big guns: the Canadian Labour Congress, the United Steelworkers and the Canadian Union of Public Employees. Unions are not permitted to make political donations, but these aren’t donations. According to Martin, they’re “gifts.”

This has apparently been reviewed by Parliament’s ethics watchdogs and passed muster. Personal gifts to a sitting MP are apparently fine, just not political donations. Oh. Good to know.

But Martin isn’t content just saying it’s legal. He went further, saying that it’s “ludicrous” to think that he’d be influenced by these donations. “If anybody thinks I could become more friendly to trade unions, then they don’t know me very well,” Martin said. “I’m a socialist and trade unionist and former head of the carpenters’ union in Manitoba.”

And Martin thinks that this is somehow better?

Influence peddling isn’t just about walking up to someone with an open mind and offering them so much cash that they come to see it your way. Helping someone who already agrees with you to stay out of trouble buys as much influence as a suitcase of money before a key vote. And in terms of distorting our democracy, how is having politicians cozying up to big money ahead of time, should “gifts” one day be needed, any better than just selling your vote to the highest bidder on a case-by-case basis?

Yes, Martin’s pro-union credentials are long established. But that’s not the point. The point is that his long-established union credentials are now resulting in large gifts to him, personally, at a time when he desperately needed the money. Maybe it won’t influence his future votes. But are we comfortable with cash rewards for past ones?

Let’s put this another way. Let’s say that the Natural Resources Minister or the Environment Minister received large gifts from oil and mining companies — since, gosh, they’d always been such big supporters of the industry. Let’s say that the Finance Minister received a big cash gift from a bank or mortgage lender — not because of what the Minister will do later, but because all the hard work he’s already put in. I suspect that most Canadians, not to mention Pat Martin and the NDP, would be outraged. And rightfully so.

The same should apply here. What Martin has done seems to be legal. But it shouldn’t be. And not breaking any laws or ethics regulations doesn’t make it right.

Rowdy university students in Sherbrooke, Que., have apparently become such a hassle that the local transit union has declared that it will no longer pick up drunk students. After several years of increasing difficulty with drunk students, and what the union claims is repeated attempts to meet with school officials, a new policy, apparently effective immediately, holds that bus drivers are not required to pick up intoxicated students. This was brought about, says the union, by drunk students behaving so obnoxiously and aggressively that police have been called every weekend since the school year resumed.

The usual suspects are outraged for the usual reasons. The head of one of the student groups wants to know how drivers will determine whether a student is drunk. Will they administer breathalyser tests before letting anyone on? The University of Sherbrooke Student Association has, for its part, deemed the entire notion discriminatory. The unions says it was prepared for those responses and is hopeful that upcoming meetings may help resolve the situation.

Alcohol on campus is, of course, not a new problem. It is more of a time-honoured tradition, really. Students drink. Often they drink too much. But there have been numerous stories in recent years about student drinking getting out of control. Even if we set aside the various transgressions and misdeeds to come out of fraternity or sorority events, where such behaviour is anticipated if not exactly tolerated, campuses and police forces have been cracking down. After a series of notoriously rowdy parties, police in London, Ont., a college/university town with a reputation for partying, are cracking down pre-emptively, much to the annoyance of students. Officials in Kingston, Ont., have resorted to cancelling homecoming celebrations, which had been getting completely out of control. Stepped up police and campus security patrols are pretty much a given for the first half of the opening semester.

Clearly, Sherbrooke is not alone in dealing with these kinds of shenanigans. But the proposed solution — or remedy, perhaps is the better term — seems designed to create more problems than it will solve. Keeping rowdy drunks off the bus, if such a goal can be accomplished, will admittedly address the issue of rowdy drunks on buses. But this is a binary equation, folks. If a rowdy drunk is not on the bus, the rowdy drunk is somewhere else. Like outside, in public, at night. While drunk and rowdy.

It’s indeed unfortunate that the bus drivers are being subjected to unpleasant behaviour. But that’s still a small price to pay to sustain the service that a bus provides. It’s not just transit for the public in this context. It’s a public safety valve. It takes drunk people and gathers them in a limited number of locations (bus stops), where they can be monitored by security or police. And then the bus takes them from these locations back to their homes, where they can sleep it off. If you remove the bus from this equation, you get two things: Quieter buses (good) and loud, obnoxious drunks who’ve blown their cab fare on booze wandering the streets, trying to walk home, peeing on dumpsters or shopfronts and passing out in parks (bad). Is this really a solution? (And none of this even addresses the risk of idiots deciding, if the bus won’t take them home, they may as well just risk driving.)

You can’t solve young people binge drinking, and you can’t prevent people from being boors in public. But you can at least make sure that most of these people get swiftly and safely home at the end of their revelry. Any student, or citizen, that truly causes a commotion and is out-of-control drunk can and should still be dealt with by the police, and charged, if necessary. But the public good of Sherbrooke, and the students, is still best served when another drunk rides the bus.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/matt-gurney-another-drunk-rides-the-bus/feed/0stdThe TTC plans to cut services during peak periods on 62 routes, including some of the busies in the city, to save $15-million.Birth of Canada’s largest private-sector union sparks optimism for beleaguered labour movementhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/birth-of-canadas-largest-private-sector-union-sparks-optimism-for-beleaguered-labour-movement
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/birth-of-canadas-largest-private-sector-union-sparks-optimism-for-beleaguered-labour-movement#commentsMon, 02 Sep 2013 18:20:44 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=358607

TORONTO — Union members flooded the streets of Toronto in a spirited Labour Day celebration emboldened by the birth of the country’s biggest union for private-sector workers.

Thousands of workers stretched for more than 12 blocks Monday in a parade peppered with steel drum bands and labour flags and banners from more than a dozen unions.

Front and centre in their red union T-shirts were members of Canada’s newest labour group, Unifor, formed this weekend from a merger between the Canadian Auto Workers and Communication, Energy and Paperworkers unions.

Unifor national president Jerry Dias called the boisterous march a symbolic start for the group as it launches an ambitious campaign to draw in members from precarious and traditionally non-union jobs.

“Today is really about opportunity, it’s about hope. It’s about us saying we’ve had it and it’s about us saying we’re determined to change the direction of the country,” said Dias.

Union membership has declined in recent years, though it saw a slight uptick to 31.5% last year, according to Statistics Canada. The public sector makes up the vast majority of union employees.

Dias, a lifelong union member who was endorsed by the former heads of the CAW and CEP, was elected Saturday with about 87% support at Unifor’s founding convention in Toronto.

Unifor currently represents some 300,000 workers.

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NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair, who was among a small contingent of New Democrat marchers, said Unifor will help solidify the base of the Canadian labour movement at a time when middle-class jobs are under attack.

“We’ve seen a stabilization in the labour movement after several years of decrease. Stephen Harper is encouraging a lot of people to get back involved in the labour movement,” Mulcair said.

“The Conservative party has been pushing down wages and working conditions for women and men across the country” through the expansion of the temporary foreign workers program, while manufacturing job losses are also taking a toll, he said.

Marcher Paul Dolgov, an actor, said joining a union has provided him with valuable protection on the job.

“The union provides us with a fair working environment. We get nice wages… basically it’s one of the best places to work and we are protected.”

One of the main raisons d’être of labour unions is to ensure worker safety. This is a laudable goal; throughout history employees have toiled in hazardous conditions, and cases like the collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh earlier this year underscore the continued need to protect their rights.

But in Canada, unions and their friends, like federal NDP leader Thomas Mulcair, are taking this argument a step further. They claim that unions not only make the workplace safer, but the general public as well, by encouraging greater government regulation, and by necessity the hiring of more bureaucrats to implement and enforce it.

In a speech this week to the United Food and Commercial Workers International union in Chicago, Mr. Mulcair argued that by “dismantling” health, safety and environmental protections as a “path to prosperity,” pro-deregulation governments — including Canada’s — have “sacrificed our long-term prosperity for their short-sighted political gain.”

“There’s a common sense role for the government to play in protecting the public,” Mr. Mulcair continued. “Ensuring working men and women earn a fair wage. Ensuring banks and large companies play by the rules. Ensuring the food we eat and the air we breathe are safe. Governments that gut their role do so at our peril.”

Together, Mr. Mulcair and the unions’ argument boils down to this: a bigger government is a safer government. The more unionized public-sector workers monitoring your meat, testing the train tracks and piling on the red tape, the safer Canadians will be. Or will they?

First, it’s a myth that the federal Conservatives have been systematically reducing the size of government since they took office in 2006. According to a report from the Parliamentary Budget Office published in June 2013, the federal civil service grew by 14% betwen 2006 and 2012. Many safety-related departments saw substantial increases. The Canadian Border Services Agency grew by 5,200 employees, or 54.6%; the Correctional Service of Canada, by 4,516 staff, or 31%; while the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency almost doubled in size, from 127 to 240 people.

In total, the federal government added 34,000 positions to the civil service over six years. Did this make Canadians safer? Not particularly. Since 2006, Canada has experienced its share of high-profile crises: the Maple Leaf Foods listeria outbreak in 2008, the XL Foods beef recall in 2012, and a host of train derailments, including the most recent horror at Lac-Mégantic.

Despite the fact government had actually grown by the time of these tragedies, Mr. Mulcair invoked these incidents as examples of the failures of a smaller state. He intoned to his union audience that “Experts from the Transportation Safety Board and Transport Canada are still investigating the role decades of deregulation played in the tragedy of Lac-Mégantic.” He claimed that cuts to food safety led to “the largest beef recall in Canadian history,” referring to the XL Foods debacle.

While the investigation into Lac-Mégantic continues, the verdict is in on XL Foods. It was concluded that the tragedy had nothing to do with a dearth of inspectors, but everything to do with “a relaxed attitude towards applying mandatory procedures … shared by both plant and [Canadian Food Inspection Agency] staff.”

In other words, food safety procedures had not been cut, they were being sloppily applied; in response, the government created a system of spot inpections to ensure on-site teams carried out their duties properly.

By way of comparison, what is the safety record of those big-government socialist countries so beloved by unions?

Even if more bureaucracy were a greater guarantee of public safety, then the unions are hypocrites, because it is their high demands for wages and benefits that drive up the cost of hiring government workers in the first place. A study published by the Fraser Institute in April 2013 found that the “wage premium” for public sector employees was 12% compared to their non-unionized private sector counterparts, and even 9.5% compared to unionized private-sector workers doing the same job. If unions really believed bigger government was safer government, they would ask for less money and more privatization (insert loud guffaws here), to allow public resources to go further.

And by way of comparison, what is the safety record of those big-government socialist countries so beloved by unions? The former workers’ paradise of the U.S.S.R. holds the record for the world’s worst nuclear tragedy, Chernobyl, in 1986. In communist China, six children died and 300,000 were sickened drinking melamine-tainted milk in 2008. And just last fall, in Venezuela, home of the late dictator Hugo Chavez, a state-owned oil refinery exploded, claiming 42 lives and injuring over 100 people.

Mulcair and the unions are wrong. Big government doesn’t guarantee public safety. What does? A combination of sensible, but not overbearing regulation; a fair and uncorrupted justice system; and a public free to pressure companies through word and deed.

In 1860, an uneasy Charles Darwin confided in a letter to a friend: “I had no intention to write atheistically” but “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.” What appalled him had fascinated entomologist William Kirby (1759-1850): The ichneumon insect inserts an egg in a caterpillar, and the larva hatched from the egg, he said, “gnaws the inside of the caterpillar, and though at last it has devoured almost every part of it except the skin and intestines, carefully all this time avoids injuring the vital organs, as if aware that its own existence depends on that of the insect on which it preys!”

Government employees’ unions living parasitically on Detroit have been less aware than ichneumon larvae. About them, and their collaborators in the political class, the question is: What. Were. They. Thinking? Well, how did Bernie Madoff or the Enron executives convince themselves their houses of cards would never collapse?

Here, where cattle could graze in vast swaths of this depopulated city, democracy ratified a double delusion: Magic would rescue the city (consult the Bible, the bit about the multiplication of the loaves and fishes), or Washington would deem Detroit, as it recently did some banks and two of the three Detroit-based automobile companies, “too big to fail.” But Detroit failed long ago. And not even Washington, whose recklessness is almost limitless, is oblivious to the minefield of moral hazard it would stride into if it rescued this city and, then inevitably, others that are buckling beneath the weight of their cumulative follies. It is axiomatic: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate.

This bedraggled city’s decay poses no theological conundrum of the sort that troubled Darwin, but it does pose worrisome questions about the viability of democracy in jurisdictions where big government and its unionized employees collaborate in pillaging taxpayers. Self-government has failed in what once was America’s fourth-largest city and now is smaller than Charlotte, N.C.

Detroit, which boomed during World War II when industrial America was “the arsenal of democracy,” died of democracy. Today, among the exculpatory alibis invoked to deflect blame from the political class and the docile voters who empowered it, is the myth that Detroit is simply a victim of “de-industrialization.” In 1950, however, Detroit and Chicago were comparable — except Detroit was probably wealthier, as measured by per capita income. Chicago, too, lost manufacturing jobs, to the American South, to south of the border, to South Korea and elsewhere. But Chicago discerned the future and diversified. It is grimly ironic that Chicago’s iconic street is Michigan Avenue.

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Detroit’s population, which is 62 percent smaller than in 1950, has contracted less than the United Auto Workers membership, which was more than 1 million in 1950, and now is around 390,000. Auto industry executives, who often were invertebrate mediocrities, continually bought labor peace by mortgaging their companies’ futures in surrenders to union demands. Then city officials gave their employees — who have 47 unions, including one for crossing guards — pay scales comparable to those of autoworkers. Thus did private-sector decadence drive public-sector dysfunction — government negotiating with government-employees’ unions that are government organized as an interest group to lobby itself to do what it wants to do: Grow.

Steven Rattner, who administered the bailout of part of the Detroit-based portion of America’s automobile industry, says “apart from voting in elections, the 700,000 remaining residents of the Motor City are no more responsible for Detroit’s problems than were the victims of Hurricane Sandy for theirs.” Congress, he says, should bail out Detroit because “America is just as much about aiding those less fortunate as it is about personal responsibility.”

The restoration of America’s vitality depends on avoiding the bottomless sinkhole that would be created by the federal government rescuing one-party cities from the consequences of unchecked power

There you have today’s liberalism: Human agency, hence responsibility, is denied. Apart from the pesky matter of “voting in elections” — apart from decades of voting to empower incompetents, scoundrels and criminals, and to mandate unionized rapacity — no one is responsible for anything. Popular sovereignty is a chimera because impersonal forces akin to hurricanes are sovereign.

The restoration of America’s vitality depends on, among many other things, avoiding the bottomless sinkhole that would be created by the federal government rescuing one-party cities, and one-party states such as Illinois, from the consequences of unchecked power. Those consequences of such power — incompetence, magical thinking, cynicism, and sometimes criminality — are written in Detroit’s ruins.

If there’s an iron rule in economics, it is Stein’s Law (named after Herb, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers): “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

Detroit, for example, can no longer go on borrowing, spending, raising taxes and dangerously cutting such essential services as street lighting and police protection. So it stops. It goes bust.

Cause of death? Corruption, both legal and illegal, plus a classic case of reactionary liberalism in which the governing Democrats — there’s been no Republican mayor in half a century — simply refused to adapt to the straitened economic circumstances that followed the post-Second World War auto boom.

Corruption of the criminal sort was legendary. The former mayor currently serving time engaged in a breathtaking range of fraud, extortion and racketeering. And he didn’t act alone. The legal corruption was the cozy symbiosis of Democratic politicians and powerful unions, especially the public-sector unions that gave money to elect the politicians who negotiated their contracts — with wildly unsustainable health and pension benefits.

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When our great industrial competitors were digging out from the rubble of the Second World War, Detroit’s automakers ruled the world. Their imagined sense of inherent superiority bred complacency. Management grew increasingly bureaucratic and inflexible. Unions felt entitled to the extraordinary wages, benefits and work rules they’d bargained for in the fat years. In time, they all found themselves being overtaken by more efficient, more adaptable, more hungry foreign producers.

The market ultimately forced the car companies into reform, restructuring, the occasional bankruptcy and eventual recovery. The city of Detroit, however, lacking market constraints, just kept overspending — $100-million annually since 2008. The city now has about $19-billion in obligations it has no chance of meeting. So much city revenue had to be diverted to creditors and pensioners that there was practically nothing left to run the city. Forty percent of the streetlights don’t work, two-thirds of the parks are closed and emergency police response time averages nearly an hour — if it ever comes at all.

Bankruptcy, which will radically cut payments to bondholders and retirees, is the only chance to start over. Yet, if a Detroit bankruptcy succeeds, other cities will be tempted to follow suit. Dozens of other large urban areas have similarly massive pension and debt obligations, with commensurately denuded services and exorbitant taxes — leading to a vicious cycle of depopulation that makes everything worse. Detroit has lost more than 60% of its population since 1950.

The moral hazard increases if the federal government steps in to help. The Obama administration is therefore firmly opposed to any “bailout,” recognizing both the political toxicity of the word and the fiscal consequences of a Detroit precedent that invites other cities to line up with a tin cup. Washington cannot afford a nationwide federal bailout of insolvent cities.

However, under pressure of the public-sector unions, whose retirees will necessarily be victimized, the administration will likely offer “assistance” — which implies whatever kind of non-cash payments, indirect funds from other ongoing federal programs and enterprise-zone tax subsidies that it can get away with.

In Wisconsin, Republicans showed that they recognize the perils of unconstrained government growth and will take on the unchecked power of government unions

But Detroit is an object lesson not just for other cities. Not even the almighty federal government is immune to Stein’s Law. Reactionary liberalism simply cannot countenance serious reform of the iconic social welfare programs of the 20th century. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are pledged to their inviolability. President Obama will occasionally admit that, for example, Medicare cannot go on as is, but then reverts to crude demagoguery when Republicans propose a structural reform, such as premium support for Medicare or something as obvious as raising the retirement age to match increasing longevity.

On the contrary. Obama added one enormous new entitlement (Obamacare) and, in his last State of the Union address, proposed yet another (universal preschool).

None of this is inevitable. In Wisconsin, Republicans showed that they recognize the perils of unconstrained government growth and will take on the unchecked power of government unions. Democratic Detroit, on the other hand, has for 50 years conducted a contrary experiment in myopia and the most imprudent passivity.

It doesn’t take a genius to see what happens when the entitlement state outgrows the economy upon which it rests. The time of Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain, the rest of insolvent social-democratic Europe — and now Detroit — is the time for conservatives to raise the banner of Stein’s Law and yell “Stop.” You can kick the can down the road, but at some point it disappears over a cliff.

While the recent cabinet shuffle has drawn some of the media’s attention away from the Senate, the attention of the public, can, and should, return to our parliament’s Upper Chamber and the role it plays in overseeing legislation. Some in the media have praised the Senate for showing “sober second thought” when it gutted my private members’ bill, C-377, which would require financial transparency from labour organizations. Even the federal New Democrats, who would abolish the Senate altogether, for a moment forgot their abolitionist tendencies to praise the work of my colleagues in the Red Chamber.

The media, and the opposition, have a right to their opinions. But in their haste to praise the Senate for its fundamental revising of my bill, they have overlooked what the bill was seeking to achieve.

In their efforts to avoid transparency and accountability, some union leaders, along with their allies in Parliament and the media disparaged C-377 as “flawed,” “unconstitutional” or even threatening the privacy of individual’s pension payments or health-care records. None of the critics, however, dared to offer an argument against the fundamental premise behind C-377: that labour organizations receive tremendous benefits from the taxpaying public in the form of tax deductions — along with the legal authority to compel members to pay dues — and they have a corresponding duty to the public to explain how they use those public benefits.

Indeed, a closer look at C-377 reveals the critics to be ill-informed, at best.

First, Bill C-377 contains a clause that specifically excludes the reporting and publication of data about pension/disability plans, health-care schemes and other registered benefits. No one’s individual privacy will be affected by C-377.

Second, despite the claim from critics, including some labour-backed provincial governments, that the bill somehow intrudes on provincial jurisdiction, a former Supreme Court of Canada Justice, the Hon. Michel Bastarache, gave his legal opinion that the bill is indeed constitutional. Indeed, he clearly noted that C-377 “merely provides for disclosure of financial information by labour organizations; it does not attempt to regulate the activities of such organizations or affect how their money is spent.”

Further, contrary to the misinformation spread by some Senators, Canadian charities have been reporting their financials publicly for the past 36 years; and labour organizations will only need to provide detailed disclosure on their political or lobbying activities, not on core functions like administration, overhead or labour relations activities. In fact, because all Canadian labour organizations headquartered in the U.S. have been required to publicly disclose this same information on the U.S. Department of Labour website for more than a decade, they can hardly oppose providing the same kind of transparency at home.

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Finally, claims the bill is “flawed” are designed to distract from the main issue. One critic even quibbled over the absence of a comma. If C-377 was so flawed, then why were the amendments the Senate of “sober second thought” passed focused on excluding all but a handful of unions from reporting, rather than correcting the supposed flaws? All private members’ bills are drafted by expert Parliamentary lawyers, and C-377 was no exception. Its purpose and impact are clear and unambiguous.

While the media has focused on the complaints of a few union leaders who don’t want to report on their spending, it is important to remember that the vast majority of Canadians, including unionized Canadians, certainly want them to. According to the 2011 Nanos Labour Day Survey, 83% of the public and fully 86% of unionized Canadians want public disclosure of union finances.

Fortunately, C-377 is not dead. In the fall, the House of Commons will be able to revisit the bill and I am confident my elected colleagues will reject the Senate amendments and send a clear message that transparency is long-overdue in labour organizations.

National Post

Russ Hiebert is the member of parliament South Surrey-White Rock-Cloverdale.

After this week’s vote to amend — eviscerate would be more accurate — Bill C-377, legislation passed by the Commons that would force labour unions to disclose their salaries and expenses, the Senate is suddenly the toast of the town.

Here, said many, was sober second thought. Eureka, said others: the Senate works! Even hard-core abolitionists joined in. The Broadbent Institute, the NDP’s house think tank, congratulated the upper house for “standing up for the rights of millions of Canadian workers.”

All agreed this was vindication for the upper house, after a long season of shame. The Senate, the National Post’s John Ivison wrote, “has shown exactly why it exists – to examine and revise legislation it believes to be flawed.” Yes indeed. It has also shown why it has to go.

The Senate’s defiance of the will of the Commons in this matter is brave, principled and wrong. The senators, Liberal and Conservative, who voted to send the bill back to the House — in effect, to defeat it — were courageous, conscientious, and completely out of line.

That the bill was flawed is immaterial; that senators had serious and substantive objections to it, the same. Without a mandate from the people, senators have no more democratic right to redraft legislation than I do.

They have the legal power to do so, without a doubt. What they lack is the legitimacy. And lacking such legitimacy, it has been the custom and convention they should not pretend to the role of elected legislators, or usurp the authority of those who are. A Senate that confines itself to reviewing legislation passed by the Commons may be tolerated, barely. A Senate that takes it upon itself to rewrite it is an abomination.

It is the lawful powers of the Senate, not the misdeeds of a few errant senators, that make the case for its reform. Corruption is found in every legislature, no matter its design. Whereas the powers of the Senate go to its very nature. On paper these powers are great indeed, almost the equal of the Commons. So long as these lie dormant, I repeat, the Senate’s status as one of the world’s last remaining appointed upper houses is merely a national embarrassment. But if senators are determined to use them, we really are in a fix.

The worst of it is that the Senate has corrupted us. It has been a part of the furniture for so long we forget what it is made of: patronage, and placeholding, and favours for favours. Yes, it also contains many good and wise people, in among the bagmen and the timeservers, but so what? A government has any number of distinguished people on whose counsel it can rely, whether in the universities, or the think tanks, or in the civil service. It does not have to give them jobs for life, or confer upon them legislative power.

That so many people are willing to stand by while a clutch of cronies of prime ministers past and present redraft a bill passed by the people’s house — even to justify it — is testament to the power of opportunism. For the NDP, in particular, those ferocious pit bulls for abolition, to roll over like sleeping puppies just because the Senate did something they happened to like, is faintly nauseating.

But then, a great many people seem sincerely incapable of separating ends from means in this matter. Yes, you don’t like the bill. Yes, the bill is flawed. In a democracy, that is the people’s prerogative, as it is of those they elect: to pass legislation some might think wrongheaded — that may even be wrongheaded, if that is what they prefer. It is not for a group of appointed commissars to substitute their own preferences in their place. Is it really necessary to say this?

If senators would like to be proper rather than pretend legislators, let them get themselves elected

This isn’t like the “backbench spring,” to which it has been compared. In fact, it’s the opposite. Those Tory MPs who assert the right to speak, to raise questions, or to vote independent of the party line do so in the name of the people they represent; at any rate, they are entitled to do so, having been elected by them. The 20 Tory senators who voted to amend the bill or abstained were in effect voting to overrule those same MPs. Though it clearly had government backing, C-377 was a private member’s bill that enjoyed wide support in caucus.

Nor can this be compared to judicial review, the power of the — unelected! — courts to overturn laws on constitutional grounds. What’s the difference? The courts are restricted to comparing one piece of legislation, the law in question, with another: the constitution. Both were passed by democratic legislatures. The courts’ role is simply to determine whether the one democratic law is consistent with the other. Whereas the Senate may, if it is so bold, reject or rewrite a law for any reason it pleases.

Judges train in the law for many years, and are selected for their impartiality. Senators may have no training whatever, and are selected for their partisanship. Virtually every democratic society appoints judges. Very few democratic societies appoint their legislators. It is the difference, in other words, between the judicial branch and the legislative, between applying the law — as every public servant does — and making it, the ancient preserve of Parliament. Where do you draw the line, as some ask? You draw it at the doors of the legislature.

The Crown is the fount of authority in our democracy, but Parliament is the fount of power. It is intolerable that that power should be exercised by any but those the people choose. If senators would like to be proper rather than pretend legislators, let them get themselves elected.

On Dec. 5, 2011, Conservative MP Russ Hiebert introduced Private Members Bill C-377, which would force unions to disclose much more information about their finances and spending habits. The bill was passed by the House of Commons, but was blocked on Wednesday by 16 renegade Conservative senators in the upper house.

The bill would have required unions to disclose details of all transactions above $5,000, including a detailed breakdown of all political and lobbying activities. It would also require unions to report any senior officials making more than $100,000 to the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) and to the public.

The idea was to bring unions in line with charities, since both types of organizations get special tax status. The ability to deduct union dues and charitable donations from their taxes allows people to divert a limited amount of money from government coffers to areas that are important to them.

But unlike giving money to charity, Canadian law compels many people to pay union dues, regardless of whether they see a benefit to the organization’s activities. This gives the members, as well as the taxman, the right to scrutinize their activities.

Under normal circumstances, forcing private organizations to divulge the level of detail called for in Bill C-377 would be a gross violation of their right to privacy. Unions, however, cannot have it both ways. They cannot be treated as private entities while using the full force of the law to require people to join or pay dues. Nor should they be allowed to enjoy tax-exempt status without telling the CRA what they’re up to.

This becomes even more important when unions engage in lobbying and other political activities. If, for example, a public-sector union started a campaign for people to shop at government-run liquor stores, instead of the private competition, or to vote for one party over the other (as has happened in British Columbia), its members and the public have the right to know.

When it comes to financial privacy, unions can’t have it both ways

But some of Canada’s unelected senators seem to disagree. In a charge led by Senator Hugh Segal, the Senate amended the bill so that unions would only have to report expenditures over $150,000 and disclose salaries over $444,000 (which is likely more than most, if not all, union bosses make). And this would only apply to groups with more than 50,000 members.

If this tactic sounds familiar, it’s because it was invented by the senators’ colleagues in the House, when they gutted MP Brent Rathgeber’s bill demanding public disclosure of civil service salaries. With the guidance of the Prime Minister’s Office, Tories in the House tried amending Mr. Rathgeber’s private members bill so that only salaries above $400,000 would be disclosed. This would have watered down the bill to the point of rendering it useless, which is why Mr. Rathgeber quit the Conservative caucus over the whole debacle.

The Senate was intended to be the chamber of sober second thought, and some will argue that by blocking this piece of legislation for the time being, the Red Chamber has fulfilled its constitutional mandate. But this move was clearly designed as a slap in the face of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. That’s not sober second thought. That’s petty vindictiveness. Not only did they oppose a completely legitimate and necessary piece of legislation, they subverted the will of the people by disregarding the will of the democratically elected House.

If senators really want to act as a check on the House of Commons, they must use whatever political capital they have to push for meaningful Senate reform. Once this country has a Triple-E — elected, equal and effective — Senate, these 16 senators, along with their Liberal and independent counterparts, will be able to make their case to the people of this country. Only when they become duly elected representatives of the people will they have the democratic legitimacy necessary to block legislation they believe is not in the best interest of the people they represent.

Conservatives in the Senate have suggested they’re willing to sit deep into the summer — maybe as late as July — to help push through a backlog of legislation. One of the bills they’re considering is a contentious private members bill requiring unions to disclose salaries and finances, which could then be publicly posted.

Bill C-377 has had many critics, including Sen. Hugh Segal, who launched a stirring oration in February declaring the bill to be unfair, punitive, too expensive and un-Torylike. It was, he said, “bad legislation, bad public policy and a diminution of both the order and the freedom that should exist in any democratic, pluralist and mixed-market society.”

The crux of his case is that the bill specifically targets unions while ignoring other non-profit organizations, and would be expensive and time-consuming to police at a time when Ottawa is trying to reduce bureaucracy and the size of the civil service.

At the disclosure level that is now in the bill — $5,000 — a two- year supply of coffee, a used car, a new computer system or printer, or the replacement of plumbing or a boiler at a union headquarters would qualify for explicit disclosure. Is this all that CRA has to do?

… If this is to apply to trade unions, why would it not apply to rotary clubs, the Fraser Institute, Christian, Muslim and Jewish congregations across Canada, the Council of Chief Executives, local car dealers or the many farming groups, like the cattlemen’s associations or the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, all of whom do great work? How about local constituency associations, food banks, soup kitchens, or anglers and hunters clubs?

All of these groups express views on policy. All have the right, under election law, to volunteer in municipal, provincial or federal elections, and all come to Ottawa to lobby and press government on issues important to them. They do so along with representatives of the defence industry, our First Nations and various cultural groups. Are they all to be swept into the CRA bureaucratic remit? That is what this bill would lead to. If CRA is to become the political judge of what expenses are appropriate, what are the guiding criteria? The bill is silent on that.

Proposed subparagraph 149.01(3)(b)(ix) lists the need to declare what is spent on labour relations activities, with no concurrent disclosure imposed on the management side. How about a law that forced my political party to disclose its campaign, travel, research and advertising budgets to the Liberal Party of Canada or to the NDP two weeks before the election was called?

Perhaps Coca-Cola should be forced to disclose to Pepsi its marketing plan and expenditures over $5,000.

How about the Montreal Canadiens having to tell the Boston Bruins whether their coach spent more than $5,000 on dinner for their team and where they ate in Boston before the game?

… I imagine that, were it to pass, subsequent legislation from the other place from private members might be aimed at newspapers; networks, TV and otherwise; student groups; universities; junior baseball leagues; and even, God forbid, community soccer. Where we are headed with this bill is down a dark alley to a very dark place indeed.

If the unions should disclose, so should the auto dealers, the C.D. Howe Institute, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, all the local Legions and all of the various local organizations.

All very colourful, but Sen. Segal misses (or ignores) the crucial difference between unions and the other organizations he mentions: you get a choice on whether to join the Rotary Club, the junior soccer league or the local church, mosque or synagogue. You may have to pay dues in some instances, but you have the ability to express your opinion on the expenditure of those dues, and withdraw your membership if you disagree. What keeps membership up in most cases is that those organizations focus their activities on furthering the interests of the people paying the dues.

What bugs the Conservatives, and many supporters of the bill, is that union members often lack this ability. They may not be required to join the union as a condition of employment, but have to pay dues one way or the other. If the union wastes the money sponsoring zany left-wing political antics that have little direct benefit to members, tough on them. The unstated aim of the bill is to ensure those paying dues are aware of such waste, so they can put greater pressure on union leadership.

Sen. Segal recognizes this, but suggests the proper antidote is to change election laws to prevent union fronts from pouring dues into political fronts during election campaigns. This has been attempted on the provincial level, but failed. Ontario’s Progressive-Conservatives have waged a long and expensive battle against Working Families, a coalition of unions that spent $2.1 million attacking them during the 2011 provincial election. But a year ago it lost a court case arguing Working Families was a front for the Liberal party, though it clearly operated to further Liberal interests.

A better approach might be to eliminate the mandatory collection of union dues. Unions insist mandatory dues are reasonable since all workers benefit from union-negotiated benefits and wages. Which is fair enough, except the people paying the dues still have no say on union leaders who spend their time, and union money, furthering personal political agendas. Union leaders, of course, could always drop these agendas and spend their time on issues of more direct practical concern to members. But that would require deflating some sizeable union egos, and isn’t likely to happen.

So Bill C-377 is what they get instead. It may be imperfect legislation, but the unions have only themselves to blame.

Beware politicians who preach false piety. I recall covering a British MP, Jonathan Aitken, who promised to fight conflict of interest allegations with the “simple sword of truth and trusty shield of fair play.” He was promptly found to be a serial liar, convicted of perjury and banged up in jail for 18 months.

That’s not to say Tom Mulcair was lying to his audience at a Canadian Club lunch in Ottawa Tuesday. But, to put it charitably, it was pure hoodwinkery.

“The only powerful interest any members of my Cabinet will ever be asked to serve is the public interest,” he said.

Really? Mr. Mulcair may not be the darling of the unions but he leads a party that was founded by the Canadian Labour Congress and the CCF.

Sweaty feet don’t come singly and you don’t get the NDP without their union brothers and sisters.

They’re not so much kin as joined at the hip. Despite electoral financing reforms, the party has twice been told by Elections Canada to pay back money it collected from unions that sponsored events at its national convention.

Mr. Mulcair was enthusiastic in his welcome for the creation of the new super-union Unifor, from the merger of the Canadian Auto Workers and the Communication, Energy and Papermakers’ unions.

But even he wasn’t as gushing as the CEP’s national president, Dave Coles – and no wonder

“Can you imagine what it will mean to the CEP and CAW when we’re the first unionized party that governs a country?” he blurted.

The party continues to fight a rearguard action against any reforms to the union movement. NDP MPs like Pat Martin and Alexander Boulerice have been vocal in their criticism of private member’s bills from Conservatives aimed at increasing transparency in the union movement.

Mr. Martin received a donation from the Carpenters’ Union (to which he used to belong) for his legal defence fund, claiming he would remove himself from any discussions affecting their issues. He later infuriated Conservatives when the same union came before a committee examining bill C-377 (that would require unions to disclose how much they spend on political activities). The Tories argued Mr. Martin should have recused himself and abstained on the vote. Instead he asked what they deemed “softball questions.”

Mr. Boulerice claims that a new private members’ bill introduced by Conservative MP Blaine Calkins, which would require a mandatory secret ballot on union certification, is an attack on workers’ rights and an attempt to drive down wages. Yet certification is an important business – one study suggests the reduction on capital investment is comparable to the impact of a 30% increase in the corporate tax rate.

Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian PressNDP Leader Thomas Mulcair at the annual convention of the Communication Energy and Paperworkers union in October 2012.

In his Canadian Club speech, Mr. Mulcair touted the NDP commitment to development (as long as it’s sustainable) and trade (as long as it’s reciprocal) and promised to raise standards, wages and expectations. NDP governments have the best record when it comes to balancing budgets, he said.

But if he is ever elected prime minister he will be obliged to confront Canada’s productivity crisis with one hand tied behind his back. Unions are a well-documented drag on productivity – they drive up the price of labour and the market price of public services; they reduce profitability, decrease spending on research and development, and slow employment growth. Studies in Canada, the U.K. and U.S. suggest unionized companies grow between 3-4% slower than non-unionized companies.

Mr. Mulcair hit the mark on the ethics file – the old-line parties (Conservatives and Liberals) have become corrupted. “They’ve lost sight of what it is they came here to do. Step-by-step the old Reform-turned-Conservative Party has turned its back on its own ideals in the pursuit of power,” he said. “Instead of changing the culture of entitlement here, they’ve become part of it.”

But to claim that the days of entitlement would come to an end with an NDP government is so much sanctimonious clap-trap.

The best he can hope for is that the old Bolsheviks from the Canadian Union of Postal Workers union take their boots off at the door of 24 Sussex Drive before making themselves at home.

A mysterious pandemic has wafted over Ontario’s Peel region, an illness that seems to particularly infect school teachers on Mondays and Fridays as the summer months approach. Indeed, the Peel District School Board (PDSB) just experienced its highest number of absentee teachers ever, with 1,664 out of the Board’s 10,000 teachers absent for the last Friday in May. According to Scott Moreash, associate director of instructional support services for the PDSB, many schools are struggling to find substitutes to staff their classrooms, with an additional 400 teachers absent on Friday as compared to the same Friday one year ago.

Now, either Ontario schools need to invest in more “Proper Hand Washing” posters, or teachers are using up their allotted 11 sick days before they expire at the end of the term. The haste is likely the result of a new contract imposed this year by Queen’s Park, wherein teachers lost their ability to bank unused sick days and saw their total number cut from 20 to 11. This new “use ‘em or lose ‘em” policy, I suspect, is causing ‘fever Fridays’ and ‘migraine Mondays.’

It’s a type of behaviour that would never be seen, much less tolerated, in the private sector. While it’s fairly accepted that teachers are generally more prone to illness — especially those minding classrooms of young students who haven’t yet learned proper coughing etiquette — no one but the odd willfully blind union head couldn’t figure out what’s going on here. No longer able to “bank” sick days for future use, teachers reckon they might as well use them up before the calendar expires. In the private sector, those are called “vacation days.”

Related

The fundamental difference is, simply, one of entitlement. The public sector has long functioned on a system of fixed sick days, initially implemented as a way to offset higher private sector salaries. Of course, that rationale has long expired; the sick day concept has since morphed in function into a bargaining chip for union negotiations. Employees are offered so-called “concessions” for trading in sick days, and in the case of Ontario teachers, an extra day of pay for those who use fewer than six sick days starting next year. A “sick day,” therefore, represents much more than simply a day home in bed; it is earned, traded, fought for and protected, so if you have them — as the thought goes — you better damn well use them.

That sort of mentality is not unique to schoolteachers. A 2012 report by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, for example, found that public sector employees take off nearly five more sick days per year than their counterparts in the private sector. Those extra days are costing taxpayers somewhere in the realm of $3.5-billion. The federal Conservatives, as a result, have initiated plans to rein in that cost by restructuring sick leave and disability for public civil servants. Under the current system, public servants get 15 sick days per year, which can be banked and carried over from one year to the next. It is expected that the Tories will propose a revision akin to that imposed on Canada Post, whereby employees are entitled to seven “personal” days, five of which can be carried over to the next year.

Even if it’s the end of May and you’re really keen on a Monday afternoon snooze, you haul yourself into work

An improvement, sure, but compare that to the private sector, where the approach is polar to the public sector’s fixation on counting their ascribed days off. Ask most people about their company’s policy and they’ll shrug — if you’re sick, you take a day off. If you need an extended leave, you get a doctor’s note. At all other times, even if it’s the end of May and you’re really keen on a Monday afternoon snooze, you haul yourself into work. Any other approach, needless to say, is unacceptable.

Granted, it’s understandable how an unused lineup of “sick” days could prove too tempting to resist. But it doesn’t make the practice any less deplorable, especially coming from a group of employees, who — in their ongoing disputes with the provincial government — have claimed so vehemently to be all about student interest. That is, of course, unless they’ve been struck with some debilitating, just-before-summer-vacation disease. Someone call Public Health.

Who should care for our children? A study published this week by the Institute for Marriage and Family Canada found that three quarters of Canadians believe that parents should. Of those polled, 76% said that it is best for children under six to be home with Mom or Dad, versus 18% who believe it is best for them to be with another competent caregiver (6% didn’t know). Even in couples where both parents work, 74% believe parent care is best. The view is also consistent across demographic, gender, income and regional lines — and in Quebec, home of $7-a-day daycare, where 70% of those polled think parents make the best caregivers for their children.

Financially, many families feel they cannot afford a parental stay-at-home option, and thus need an alternative. According to parents with children under the age of six, their non-parental preferences are, in order, relatives (50%), neighbourhood home daycare (24%), not-for-profit daycare (15%), and for-profit daycare (6%).

In other words, family and family-like settings trump institutional daycare across the board. So why are so many governments and political parties running in the other direction, promising to create more big-box spaces, implement full-day junior kindergarten, and find other creative ways to outsource our kids?

The answer lies in who’s got the loudest lobby — and in Canada, it isn’t stay-at-home parents, it’s unions.

Check out the websites of pro-daycare organizations, and you will find that they are dominated by, if not heavily associated with, the labour union movement. The Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care bills itself as “non-partisan,” but co-sponsors its events with the Ontario section of the Canadian Union of Public Employees. The website of the B.C. group cantaffordchildcare.ca, which is promoting $10-a-day childcare, is run by the B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union. And a favoured guest of organizations in both provinces is NDP MP Olivia Chow, who isn’t exactly on the side of management.

Why is organized labour on the front lines of the childcare debate? It’s not hard to guess. Daycare and full-day kindergarten represent a growth industry for the union movement, which has seen its membership decline in recent years, as manufacturing jobs and traditional employers such as Canada Post feel the pinch of a changing economy.

Big labor’s involvement in child care, however, is not positive for families. When governments implement cheap state-funded child-care, unionized providers step in, drive up costs — and go on strike. Last year in Quebec, daycare workers walked off the job, inconveniencing thousands of parents; their demands included six weeks of holidays after 15 years service. And over time, their wage demands have pushed the cost of the program sky-high. According to CIRANO, a leading Quebec research Institute, in 1996 Quebec’s then $5-a-day daycare was estimated to cost taxpayers $288 million a year — but by 2010, they were forking out $2-billion annually.

Unlike in Canada, in the United Kingdom, the voices of stay-at-home or part-time working parents do get attention

Other initiatives, like full-day junior kindergarten, also cost Canadians dearly, while reducing options for parents.

Case in point: my neighbourhood in the Ontario town of Whitby boasts three local public schools. Not one offers just half-day junior kindergarten. At one school, which shall remain nameless, the registrar told me that they would be forced to mark my daughter as “absent/truant” if she left at lunchtime. (She also added that she wouldn’t send her own child to school all day there at the age of four.) So this fall I will end up driving my daughter 15 minutes each way to a private half-day program in another part of town, while paying taxes for the full-day JK I don’t want.

Unlike in Canada, in the United Kingdom, the voices of stay-at-home or part-time working parents do get attention. A debate has raged since early this year about the UK government’s proposal to increase the number of children cared for by outside caregivers. Last week, the groundswell of opposition from stay-at-home parents forced Prime Minister David Cameron to declare that he did not want to force mothers of small children to go back to work — and to explore other options such as a marriage tax break.

In Cameron’s words, “The idea is not to dictate to people what they should do, but to support the choices they make.” It’s a mantra that more Canadian governments would live by if they paid attention to what parents really want.

Jonathan Kay celebrates the successes of Canada’s foreign-born resident immigrants who he claims willing assimilate into Canada’s culture and economy. By contrast, Mr. Kay sees a “looming crisis” in the First Nations’ inability or reluctance to likewise be assimilated into the norms established by Canada’s governing immigrant majority.

To redress this problem Mr. Kay, suggests that the government do “all it can to integrate reserve-resident aboriginals into the Canadian economy [because] the preservation of native culture on remote landscapes … has had its day.” In other words, the culture of these “inconvenient Indians” is no more than an anachronistic nuisance.

Like Mr. Kay, many Canadians insist that some day First Nations’ leaders will come to understand (the easy way or the hard way) that assimilation into the Canada’s immigrant culture is the best thing the First Nations could possibly do for themselves.

On the other hand, some day Canadians may come to understand (the easy way or the hard way) that an honest national accommodation with aboriginal cultures and a fair sharing of the wealth in Canada’s natural resources are the best policies Canadians could adopt for themselves and for Canada.

Douglas Bland (professor emeritus at Queen’s University and author of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute study: Canada And The First Nations: Co-operation or Conflict?), Kingston, Ont.

Unions are part of democracy

Re: Harper’s War Against Workers, George Smith, May 7; The Union Blight, Conrad Black, May 4.

Conrad Black, by words, and Prime Minister Harper, by action, would restrict the rights of public sector unions and change the governance of Crown corporations, unilaterally, “in the public interest.” They say “trust us” to define the public interest. My vote is for an active debate involving labour, management and government. If the rights of public sector unions are deemed to be against the public interest through this debate and the legislative framework revised accordingly, so be it. That is how Canadian democracy works.

George Smith, Fellow, School of Policy Studies and Adjunct Professor, School of Industrial Relations, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ont.

Andrew Coyne’s reaction to the National Research Council’s “new business-friendly mandate” suggests that government sponsored research and development should have no market driven purpose. Why wouldn’t the federal government want to leverage knowledge-based Canadian jobs and contribute to the competitiveness of the Canadian economy through public investments in R&D?

Mr. Coyne’s implied confidence in the ability of Canadian industry to “win” in global markets with one arm tied behind its back in the face of largely unfettered foreign government interventionist policies is flattering but hopelessly outdated.

Good on the federal government to understand how life in the real world works.

Andrew Coyne uses an interesting angle in his column about the redirection of the National Research Council toward applied research, as opposed to conducting basic science. It may be true that this government is preoccupied with the creation of jobs. However, what is important here is finding the right balance between basic and applied research.

Advances in science come first when someone has an idea and he decides to pursue it. This may happen in a government lab, in a company’s research facility or in a basement. The key in all cases is the support these innovators get to pursue these ideas. The Post-it note is an example. In 1968, 3M managers gave one of their scientists funds to develop a super-strong adhesive, but instead he accidentally created a “low-tack”, reusable adhesive. This “failed product” turned into a huge money-making invention.

To spend funds and effort towards applied research, you need the basic idea. What is even more important is that governments should foster the conditions for these two to feed each other.

Nikos Christodoulou, Ottawa.

Politics is not about popularity

Re: When Canada Betrayed The Jews, Brian Mulroney, May 10.

I have never read a more genuine endorsement of Canadian Jews than in this column by Brian Mulroney. It makes me proud that I voted for his party when he was leader of the Conservative party.

One of the things I love about the Post is the diversity of views it presents. The letter from Rizwan Jabbar warns that the rising Muslim demographic means more Muslims will be voting and suggests that politicians, particularly the Tories, would be wise to bring their beliefs into line with that community, if they wish to retain power.

This contrasts sharply with the column by Brian Mulroney, in which he rightly points out that prime ministers must tell the people what they have to know, not necessarily what they want to hear.

It would be a sad day for democracy in general, and Canada in particular, if our politicians were to fall into the trap of pandering to the likes and dislikes of any one community merely to score votes. True leadership must be a matter of moral and ethical conviction, not a popularity contest.

This column notes: “The high-profile Arctic Council chairmanship falls to a Canadian aboriginal woman and Cabinet Minister precisely at a moment when these issues will unquestionably emerge into this intergovernmental forum. It’s … high time that a distinguished northern aboriginal leader [be appointed chair] of the high-profile Arctic Council.”

What an insulting observation by Ron Wallace. By all accounts, Leona Aglukkaq is an intelligent person. If you must mention race, however, she does not have credentials remotely comparable with, say, those of the internationally renowned Inuit doctor Noah Carpenter or with the recently deceased and much lamented four-times Olympic cross-country skier from Inuvik, Shirley Firth Larsson.

Chris Selley makes a keen observation on the duties of a police chaplain. He noted the balagan (Yiddish for huge mess) that has erupted as a result of an Ontario rabbi’s decision to cancel an address by provocative anti-Muslim agitator and “conspiracy theorist Pamela Geller.” Mr. Selley explained that the rabbi made this decision allegedly under “threat” from the York Region Police (YRP) that he would lose his voluntary position as a police chaplain if he permitted the talk to proceed (a threat the YRP denies making). The usual crowd of like-minded Geller supporters accused the police of “censorship” and trying to stifle free-speech.

I believe Pam Geller has every right to speak in Toronto as long as she is cognizant of our laws and does not violate them. However YRP also has a responsibility to supervise their police chaplains as they deem appropriate. Sponsoring a rabidly anti-Islamic speaker, even if she stays within the bounds of the law, is certainly inconsistent with the diversity and sensitivity expected from a police chaplain.

As it turns out, there is no free speech issue. Ms. Geller will be speaking in Toronto on May 13. She just won’t be speaking under the auspices of a Jewish police chaplain.